When John Keats first read John Chapman's translations from Homer, he immortally compared the experience to having a "new planet" swim into his ken. He felt, he guessed, the way explorer Hernando Cortez did when he first stared at the Pacific, while "silent upon a peak in Darien."

Discovering the short stories of Lydia Davis felt a good deal less cosmic or oceanic. We are, after all, moving with her toward the utmost end in the post-Updike direction of American fiction. Toward the micro, in other words, not the macro. She's the next step after William H. Gass and Nicholson Baker. She may be the great living virtuoso of self-consciousness.

She is also a writer quite literally capable of making "protagonists" of flies, caterpillars and cockroaches.

Her "stories" can, in fact, be shorter than the two-sentence blurbs on the cover of this book. The classic — always quoted — is "Index Entry." In its entirety, it reads "Christian, I'm not a." Two pages later, there is a "story" called "Example of the Continuing Past Tense In a Hotel Room." That one, whole, reads thus: "Your housekeeper has been Shelly."

Nor is it the only story to imply, through apparent analysis of grammar, a vast constellation of feeling (see the 27-page story "We Miss You: A Study of Get Well Letters From a Class of Fourth Graders" in the full knowledge that 27 pages is, indeed, long for a Lydia Davis story).

And if, for one instant, you think that "Hotel Room" is a new kind of wised-up hilarity, Donald Barthelme-style, for the Age of Irony, I'm not sure you've read her right. Many find great humor in Davis. I'm not sure such virtuoso compression doesn't, instead, sometimes leak out immense anger, and elegiac sweetness (why was she in the hotel room? What happened? What did Shelly have to clean up after? You could imagine a chapter in a novel about everything the "story" doesn't tell).

It is tempting to call such one, two, three paragraph stories "minimalist." But that implies an "ism" — a "minimal-ism," encompassing, say, Raymond Carver, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, etc.

Her stories are "minimal," not "minimalist." She is really part of no discernible movement. She is simply herself, one of the most interesting writers in America and one actively engaged in redefining what fiction is (just as the great Eliot Weinberger is engaged in redefining what essays are. Not surprisingly both are very gifted translators of landmark writers: Davis of Proust and, soon, of Flaubert and Weinberger of Borges).

A few biographical details: She was born in 1947, and from 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster, another writer well-known for translating from the French. Davis is now married to a painter, Auster to Siri Hustvedt, a fascinating writer known for, among other things, referring matter-of-factly to her own considerable beauty in her work.

Davis' first story collection, "Break It Down," was published in 1986. In one and a half pages, there is a story, "Visit to Her Husband," about a divorce discussion so nerve-jangling that it constantly sends both principals to the bathroom to urinate. Seat-up, seat-down comedy ensues and then a kind of posttraumatic daze. It is stupendous what Lydia Davis can do in a page and a half.

That—and shorter—has always been her modus operandi. This book collects all the work that didn't begin to receive the billboard encomiums it deserves — "Break It Down" from 1986, "Almost No Memory" from 1997 and the extraordinary National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance" from 2007.

One "story" in the latter is simply an apology for misspelling Friedrich Nietzsche's family name, just like the father she once mocked for doing so. A tiny sentiment, to be sure, but one with melancholy echoes.

But then, in "Kafka Cooks Dinner" you have the quintessential Davis story — a reimagination of Franz Kafka's lacerating self-consciousness extinguishing his relationship with Felice and about to do the same to his relationship to Melina. Lest one think it's just what happens when a chaotic literary genius tries to cook dinner for a woman, read "Meat, My Husband" about a wife trying to cook healthy food for a husband who clearly craves some contradictory gustatory riot.

There is more than two decades of wildly original work in this "Collected Stories," much of it very funny indeed and much of it something else altogether requiring a lot of contemplative space.

And thereby hangs one small problem. As with Carver's stories, these can be read in great quantities at one comfortable sitting. But that's not how they are best read. They're best a few or slightly more at a time, with a lot of resonating space for echoes in between.

At the same time, the very size of the book — almost identical in dimensions and heft to the books Edmund Wilson, by author specification, used to publish with Farrar, Straus and Giroux — makes reading it at one long, long sitting very easy, as Wilson always knew.

Think of discovering Davis, then, not as a "new planet" swimming into your ken, but a previously unsuspected subatomic particle.

Jeff Simon is The News' Arts and Books Editor.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

733 pages, $30